Empowering IT adoption for Filipino companies through the cloud

Open Source Information Technology Solutions, Inc. in the Philippines leverages on the cloud to reduce its operating costs, increase system scalability and flexibility, and achieve faster deployment

Open Source Information Technology Solutions, Inc. (IOSS) is an IT services and solutions provider that specializes in the development of customizable and cost-effective solutions for open source tools and technologies. Based in the Philippines, IOSS supports companies by providing alternatives to expensive commercial software, catering to their specific needs not readily found in the market. IOSS provides analysis, development and implementation of its IT solutions, in addition to network and administration services and maintenance. Its clientele includes companies in the manufacturing, medical, financial, e-Government and non-profit sectors.

Keeping up with application demands
Under its previous IT infrastructure, IOSS utilized on-premise servers to run testing, development and production processes, as well as to host customer solutions. As more customers engaged its services, IOSS faced a sharp increase in workload, resulting in performance issues and significant increases to IT expenditure due to the need for more computing resources.

IOSS’ previous IT infrastructure did not have the capability to cater to the added workload that resulted from new business opportunities, which meant additional purchases of more hardware to keep up with resource demands. However, the company realized that just adding on physical storage and computing power was not sustainable over the longer term, since it would have had to transfer additional costs to our customers.
What IOSS needed was a flexible, cost-effective way for us to supplement its current IT infrastructure, while reducing complexity. The solution would also need to be highly scalable in order to cater to the demands of its users over time.

Mapping the path to a cloud-based computing environment
To better support its customers and ease the strain on its in-house servers, IOSS engaged experts from IBM Global Technology Services – Integrated Technology Services to work out a feasible plan to integrate a cloud solution into its overall IT infrastructure.
IOSS chose to implement the IBM SmartCloud Enterprise solution – IBM’s enterprise-class public cloud infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) offering – and signed on for the service under a ‘pay-as-you-go’ service model. IBM SmartCloud Enteprise delivers compute options with virtual IT infrastructure support and dedicated computing environments for an extra level of protection.

The solution delivered a secure and scalable hosted IT infrastructure with on-demand access to virtual server and storage resources, making it a perfect fit for IOSS. The company now runs its development, test and production workloads activities, as well as other dynamic workloads on the cloud.

Increased performance, scalability and cost-efficiency
After implementation, IOSS noticed several benefits almost immediately. By placing its heavy-processing workloads onto the cloud, the strain on its in-house servers was eased, improving the performance of work processes. Its IT department could also now respond with greater agility to workload spikes, and securely deploy applications for its clients from the cloud.

In addition, up-front implementation costs were minimized through the ‘pay-as-you-go’ service model. With virtually unlimited system capacity, IOSS now enjoys greater flexibility when it needs to scale up or down according to evolving client requirements.

The solution also provided a self-service portal that aids in monitoring and management, which in turn helps to greatly reduce administration time and complexity. This presented IOSS with the means to achieve faster deployment and shorten purchasing cycles, resulting in an increase of its return on investment (ROI). With the IBM cloud solution, IOSS can now work more efficiently to meet its business requirements, without requiring additional investments in new hardware.

By supplementing its IT infrastructure with a flexible and sustainable cloud solution, IOSS can now offer even more cost-effective solutions to help push greater IT adoption amongst businesses in the Philippines.

The solution

The benefits

A highly scalable and cost-effective cloud-based environment that supplemented the existing IT infrastructure for reduced IT costs, improved computing performance and a more streamlined deployment of application services.